


eyes and hands, sometimes bullets

by whimsicaltwine



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: ...sort of, Angst, Body Horror, Crying, Dissociation, Gen, Guns, Hurt/Comfort, Shooting Guns, you'll see - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26884876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicaltwine/pseuds/whimsicaltwine
Summary: A newly mechanized Gunpowder Tim encounters Brian.  They have a little more in common than they might think.Title from Body Terror Song by AJJ
Relationships: Drumbot Brian & Gunpowder Tim
Comments: 9
Kudos: 50





	eyes and hands, sometimes bullets

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty new to the mechs, so forgive me if my characterization is off. Also I know nothing about guns and am unwilling to learn so you'll have to deal with my vagueness.

After she’s done with him, Dr. Carmilla sends him out of her lab and leaves him standing there in the unfamiliar hallway, still wearing the tattered remains of the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d been captured by the Kaiser. Pain still lingers beneath his skin, and the phantom whir of a drill bounces around32 in his mind. For a moment, he just stands there in something adjacent to shock, something that fills his body and mind up with static, something that feels like drifting and being frozen to the spot all at once. The world looks wrong through eyes that click like a camera shutter when he closes them; there are too many colors.

He _hurts._ There are red marks against his wrists, where he’d struggled against the cold metal holding him down, where he’d thrashed, screaming and crying and begging and wishing for it to stop stop _stop,_ and he’s sure there are matching ones under his clothes, around his biceps, across his chest, his legs. Or maybe they’ve healed already, like the incisions that’d knit themselves together before he could get a good look at the aftermath.

In the end, he just picks a direction and starts walking. It’s not like he’ll know where he’s going, either way. His footsteps ring hollow against the metal floor as he walks, and he hardly registers the bulletholes riddling the some of the panels besides him, nor the vent grates above his head that hang open from their hinges, too caught up in the fog. If not for the fact that he’d been able to acutely feel everything she’d done to him, he’d blame it on the aftereffects of anaesthesia. As it is, fear creeps up his spine, pushing forward the possibility that it’s a result of the operation, and he’s like this forever now, there-but-not and stuck in thoughts that aren’t his own for the rest of his life.

He hits a junction, mindlessly takes a left, and finds himself in a room.

There’s a rug, which spurs him to realize that he’s not wearing shoes. He wonders where they’ve gone, or if they’re salvageable. They have Bertie’s laces on them and Tim’s own dog tag tucked inside, and he loosely reaches up to clasp the other one, which he’s surprised is still around his neck.

There’s also a bed here, made, but not particularly neatly; the pillows are crooked, and the navy blue sheets aren’t properly tucked in where the bed meets the wall, forming a crumpled strip. Looking up, he finds a collection of drawers inset into the wall just next to a hanging banjo. There’s a desk in the corner opposite the bed, and a window through which he can make out another section of the ship with an abstract backdrop of swirling colors he can not name or understand. Stars, more than he’s used to, clutter every inch of the view. 

He’s just about to leave when he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

It’s not that he’s disheveled. He is, has been for years now, thinner than he was when he left for the moon and with a tangled mess of matted hair that’d probably made him look every inch the deranged madman after Bertie’s death, not that he cares. No, it’s everything else.

The first word that comes to mind is mangled. She’s _mangled_ him, not only replaced his eyes but carved out all the skin around them and filled it in with cold, hard metal that gleams in the ship’s lights. It almost reminds him of raccoons back on earth (the earth he’d destroyed), if raccoons had mechanical parts clambering out of their faces and fusing to their skin with raised bumps that remind Tim of the seams left over after welding things together — god, was that what she’d done? Melted his face to his new eyes? The bridge of his nose is more or less gone, and Tim looks in the mirror and sees irritated skin and shiny metal and jumbled together parts and there, after a moment in which he simply stands in shock, his voice catches on a sob.

No tears come with it. 

There’s only one time Tim’s felt like more like crying than the moment he realizes he can’t. He lets himself collapse, ending up kneeling on the floor, holding his foreign face in his hands, and mourns his sorry self with nothing but stuttery breaths.

He thinks of his mom reassuring him as he moped over not having a date to a dance in high school, thinks of, “any girl would want somebody with beautiful eyes like yours,” thinks of Bertie complimenting him on the same thing, thinks of doing his makeup before a night out or just because. He thinks of watching Jonny get torn apart by bullets before standing right back up again as if nothing had ever happened half an hour later and feeling hate crowd into his chest because how _dare_ he cheat death when so many others have died. He thinks of how he turned around and did it himself.

Sadness and despair collapse into a desperate sort of anger and before he knows it he’s bolting up from the floor, sweeping everything off the desk and reveling in the crash that the jar of pencils and pens makes as it hits the ground, sending its contents scattering across the room. He tears the chair from its place and hurls it at the opposite wall. He thinks he hears the wood crack, but he can’t be sure because he’s already turned his attention to upending the desk entirely before moving to ripping the covers off the bed.

He doesn’t notice he’s not alone in the room anymore until a cold, hard hand seizes his wrist, bringing him to a standstill fueled by shock and force alike, as he’s on his way to the banjo on the wall, rage still humming in his limbs like an engine. Trying to wrench himself out of the grip does nothing; he’s held fast.

“You know, if this was anyone else’s room, you’d be shot several times by now,” someone says, their voice just a bit _off_ in a way Tim can’t quite place. He tries to jerk away again. It doesn’t work this time either. “Are you going to destroy the only thing I really don’t want you breaking if I let you go?” Tim grunts; the stranger sighs, but releases him.

Tim whirls around with violence brimming up in his veins only to find himself frozen again, this time fueled only by shock. He stares.

The person — thing? — person in front of him could be mistaken for a particularly detailed sculpture, if not for the fact that he’d moved not a moment ago and Tim can see the wires at his wrist joint poking out under the sleeve of his coat. Golden-toned metal shines dully from under the not-quite buttoned collar of his shirt, but more strikingly, the color and luster carry on to his face, where it’s broken up into intricate plates lined with dark rivets marching across the edges of each would-be muscle group in neat little lines.

It only takes a moment for his stuttering mind to catch up with the fact that the doctor is responsible for him, as well, before cascading on to the thought that at least he doesn’t have it that bad and then flip-flopping into hey, at least he _matches._ There are no horrific seam lines to be found on him, and his eyes still look like — well, like a person’s, nothing like Tim’s new charcoal gray sclera and black irises. 

“Brian,” he states, extending a hand to shake. Tim wants to punch him in the face, but he doubts it would go well for his hands. He settles for doing nothing, letting stray energy buzz through his limbs, looking for any sort of discharge. A moment passes; Brian stands there, considering him. “Let’s go for a walk,” he finally says, and Tim, dumbfounded and glad to at least be moving, follows him. 

Brain’s steps are heavy against the floor of the ship, and each time his foot falls a loud metallic clank rings out into the hallway. The floor is cold against Tim’s bare feet. He wants his boots back, even as crusted with moon-mud as they were. 

“You’re on the Aurora,” Brain starts, and Tim reconsiders punching him because he does _not_ want to listen to anybody talk right now. “Sorry about the welcoming committee, I promise the rest of us are better.” A beat. “Marginally. The worst anybody’ll do is kill you, and if Jonny’s being annoying you can just shoot him. He’s talked about you a bit — Tim, right?”

Tim nods. He’s almost made up his mind to tackle him when all of the sudden he’s being pushed into the most hellishly disorganized armory he’s ever seen. 

There are a few targets painted on the far wall, and tables full of scrap metal scattered about, but what really catches his attention are the guns clustered in plies and crates around the edges of the room, rifles and pistols and heavy-looking amalgamations of metal that look absolutely _wicked._ It doesn’t even take him a second to leave Brian behind, making a beeline for a scuffed up monster of a thing that, based on its state of disrepair, probably isn’t safe to fire. Tim doesn’t give a fuck. He checks to make sure there’s ammunition and unloads a whole clip into the wall, relishing in the recoil, loads another clip and repeats the process. At some point, he thinks he starts screaming, loud and unhinged and filled with a twisted knot of emotions that’s condensed itself, for the moment, into anger.

The screams eventually turn into words, though he doesn’t know if he’s talking to Brian or himself or nobody at all, simply hurling everything out into the world blindly. “I look like a fucking horror movie monster,” he yells, “and everyone’s dead and I don’t care because the Kaiser is too and I can’t—“ bang— “fucking—“ bang bang— “ _cry!_ The next scream is wordless again, filled with violence and agony and the hurricane caught in his chest. It’s a tearing sort of sound, the kind that rips through a room and strikes you in the center of your chest and makes you wince, the kind that feels like it should shatter glass, even though it doesn’t. 

Tim’s let the gun and himself alike fall to the ground, and stays there, screaming, his eyes squeezed shut as he clutches at his hair with clawed hands. He thinks, distantly, that there would be tears, if it was possible. That just makes it all worse. 

Eventually, he cuts out, letting heavy, gasping breaths take over, and a cold, heavy hand falls on his shoulder. He can’t muster up the energy to swat it off, and so he sits there, a puddle on the floor, as Brian takes a seat next to him, carefully folding himself up and settling down on the floor with the shifting and settling of metal.

“It’s the same way for me,” he says, soft and gentle like a draft of cool air in the summertime. “Can’t cry either. And I definitely don’t look like myself. I’m not like you, not so—“

“Horrific?”

A moment of hesitance. Brian cocks his head. “Yeah. But I understand, in a way. Ivy calls it dysphoria.” 

Tim’s breathing has started to slow by now, tumbling from heaving gasps into stuttering little things that get pushed from his chest in small puffs of air. He scrapes his nails across the floor besides him. “Does it get better?”

Again, the answer only comes after a moment or two, a hesitant thing that escapes into the air almost as if it’s ashamed to be there. “You get used to it,” Brian says, before pushing himself up off the ground and offering a hand to Tim, who looks up with eyes that should be red and puffy but are made of rigid, dark metal. Brian gives a small smile, offering, “We could go get you some new clothes, if you want. You can borrow some of mine, or try and steal somebody else’s — Nastya’s might fit you.” 

It takes him a moment, but Tim takes his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Little research notes, because I am a nerd and did a bir of googling for this: as far as I understand, all stars emit at least _some_ light in the visible spectrum for humans, but some may be so dim that they’re essentially impossible to see from as far away as other stars — this is why we use telescopes that detect wavelengths that we can’t register. Working on the assumption that Tim has a way wider visible range because of his mechanism, he wouldn’t only be able to see a bunch of new colors, but a lot more stars than the others (save Brian I guess, although I like to think his eyes probably aren’t as specialized as Tim’s, as he has a lot of other mechanism going on and Carmilla based him on his own designs). Here (http://hubble.stsci.edu/webb_telescope/science_on_the_edge/beyond_the_visible/) is a cool website showing this difference because I’m a huge nerd and love space. Obviously, humans can’t perceive infrared light, so the colors in the pictures are visual representations of ”invisible” things, but still.


End file.
